On Whose Basis is Corruption Measured in Africa/SADC?

be only moderately honest. The organisation’s rated the most honest as being the Ministries of Health and Education, the Postal Services, and church and religious organisations.

Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe are important conceptualisation and characterised of activities that may not necessary constitute the envisaged socio-political-economic ills (Tsheola, 2013).

Scholarship too is guilty of failing to generate nuance knowledge and conceptualisation of practices (Pillay, 2004). This paper seeks to question the general acceptance of the hegemonic conception of corruption in Africa based on the SADC perspective and to argue that some of the activities that are cast through this conceptualisation may in practice be providing the opportunity for emancipation and development of former colonies. That is, the hegemonic conceptualisation of corruption needs to be questioned and tested for its integrity and validity within the Africa cultural values and morality matrices. This article also hopes to suggest that some of the activities classified as corruption may actually be productive for development. There can be no conceptual and analytical coherence on corruption across societies and countries (Pillay, 2004). To this degree, Non-Governmental Organisation and such other institutions that proclaim a fundamentalist perspective on universalic truths about corruption are actually pursuing a victim blaming agenda. To this extent, the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index scoring of South Africa at 43 and the USA at 73 should remain meaningless.

Aboa-Bradwell (2011) argues that the myth of African rulers being intrinsically undemocratic, corrupt and dictatorial permeates the frequent references in Western media and books to some African leaders as being corrupt simply because they do not adhere to all the demands of the Western countries of how Africans should rule their states leaves much to be desired. Though surprising, the inability of so many people to admit that traditional African leaders do not have a monopoly on corruption, and that they should not be excluded from the democratic process on the basis that they may commit a misdeed that all human beings are exposed to, is understandable. It reflects the persistence of the misrepresentation of traditional African societies as intrinsically undemocratic, and highlights the crucial need to dispel this myth. International organizations like the World Bank as one of the institutions the world is using to measure corruption have identified corruption as ‘the single utmost obstacle to economic and social development’ (World Bank, 2001).

Corruption is a variable that cannot be measured directly. However, in recent years, numerous organizations have developed a corruption perception-based index across a wide range of countries to qualitatively measure the universality of corruption. These indices have been used in econometric studies either as a dependent variable when exploring the roots of corruption or as an explanatory variable when scrutinising its consequences. Undoubtedly, these perception-based indices have made a significant influence to the understanding of the pervasiveness of corruption across countries. They are, however, not free of problems. One such problem refers to the fact that these indices do not relate directly to the factors that are responsible for initiating corruption. The consequence of this may be that the connection

between perceived corruption and actual corruption is low (Dreher, Kotsogiannis & McCorriston, 2007).

The publication of the first CPI in 1995 has paved the way for a wider assessment of the extent of corruption in a growing cross-section of African countries. Corruption in Africa is measured significantly, by Transparency International whose Global Corruption Barometer also provides understandings into how willing and ready people are to act towards stopping corruption. Importantly, however, the people surveyed around the world as a part of the Global Corruption Barometer do not view themselves as helpless victims of corruption (Global Corruption Barometer, 2013). In most SADC Countries today, association with the state, holding a government position and accumulation of wealth cannot escape accusations of corruption by the citizenry. However, one wonders on whose basis is corruption in the SADC countries measured. The researcher hopes that this paper will help dispel this misconception about corruption in Africa from a SADC perspective and encourage democratic, civic and social engagement amongst African communities and other researchers to research more on the above topic (Aboa-Bradwell, 2011).

Though there is impartially a general agreement that corruption is a trans-systemic phenomenon widespread to all societies, regimes, and countries, and salient in different periods of the history of mankind, the study of corruption reveals a weaker agreement as to its meaning, measurement, and clarification. Empirical studies constantly are faced with three major issues that may hamper further comparative understanding of the phenomenon. First, corruption lacks an accurate definition or agreement upon its meaning. Like many other concepts in social sciences, corruption is volatile and subject to historical, social, and cultural associations. Second, corruption is prone to variations across time and space. Its measurement, both in terms of volume as well as the standards qualifying that form of behaviour, prior to any attempt at explaining how the phenomenon expands, grow and mutates contextually. Third, without clearing the first two methodological steps, the empirical testing of a subsequent hypothesis is bound to show rather limited or disputed results (SA). At the Davos World Economic Forum sessions on “de-risking Africa, President Zuma rightly discharged the basic assumptions that Africa was corrupt and risky as an erroneous exaggerated because some of the practices considered as corruption for Africa are acceptable business practices elsewhere (Tsheola, Nembambula & Mtsweni, 2013).

A new agreement of, “corruption” is inimical to first world economic development, is sending a nervous West back into Africa with patterns of engagement strikingly evocative of the bad days of colonial rule. This consensus has a fascinating grip on international aid choices and accounts for billions of heavily tagged anti-“corruption” dollars now flowing annually from the West to Africa in a massive yet grievously uncoordinated public administration mission to rid the continent of “corruption”. The West is conducting this mission on its specific positions and in its own style (Osabu-Kle, 2000). The result is a rapidly growing anti-corruption movement, or

industry, spreading under close western observation across Africa. Accompanying donor dollars to Africa is a very narrow and very western definition of “corruption”, which in turn pivots the equally narrow methods employed to measure it. Influential definitions of corruption are the definitions of the powerful nations and in the history worn unequal encounters between Africa and the West the latter’s international business-centric view of “corruption” prevails. Despite a daring counter-insurgency from African scholars (Wiredu, 1996; Abdi, 1999; Osabu-Kle, 2000;

Adekson, 2004; Mushanga, 2004; Prempeh, 2004) the indigenous prerogative to make the final call on what constitutes “corruption”, and by extension how to measure and control it, has been suppressed under a semantic and methodological tsunami that is flooding in from the West.

Zaman & Rahim (2009) argue that the CPI is widely misunderstood to measure

“corruption” per se, it does not do this. Rather, it measures perception-based epiphenomenal choices of it. This raises two issues. First, are the measures of “corruption” proxies as good as measures of the material of “corruption”? Second, who is doing the perceiving? There is no evidence that CPI results influence “corrupt” countries to alter their governance styles. And why should it when all the CPI calculates is a representation version of the real thing. None of the nine survey sources used by TI to construct the annual CPI measure the phenomenon of “corruption”

directly. Rather these sources measure what they distinctly consider to be epiphenomenal occurrences that in their opinion point to the existence of “corruption”. In this kind of indirect reasoning, a conclusion that “corruption” exists is compelled by, or reached from, these previously known epiphenomenal facts. De Maria (2008) further point out that there was no one point at which colonialism formally ceased, the colonial condition and its formal structures of domination did not suddenly disappear after the end of formal direct-rule. The effects of colonialism continue to reverberate in reflective cultural and material ways, mainly when colonialism is understood as the modern global system of hegemonic economic power under late capitalism. De Maria (2007) argues that corruption is not uniform, nor is it constant. Rather it is ephemeral and socially-shaped. The reality of cultural differences requires the essence of corruption to remain permanently the subject of debate about moral standards that should apply to the holders of public trust and duty. At the very least this position authorises non-westernised African voices in the discourses about corruption and targets the West’s self-elected directive to regulate the limitations of this discourse and infiltrate African public policy.

Dalam dokumen 3rd SAAPAM LIMPOPO CHAPTER Annual Conference (Halaman 66-69)